21 October 2008

From John Lahr’s masterful profile of Harold Pinter in the last 2007 issue of The New Yorker:

Pinter’s plays, on the other hand, offered no exhortations, no admonitions, no solutions, no common ground among people. “I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it’s more like a quicksand,” he wrote. “We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened?” Pinter’s plays reenact this difficulty of knowing. “Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labeled and ready for export is dead … and meaningless.”